"Lua is a powerful, light-weight programming language designed for extending applications. Coupled with it being relatively fast and having a very lenient license, it has gained a following among game developers for providing a viable scripting interface. It has been used in games such as World of Warcraft and Far Cry, and in applications such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Snort."

euphoria has two core data types, numbers + vectors, and vectors pale in comparision to luas tables. lua has functions as first class citizens with the full lambda calculus. euphoria is not functional at all.

Euphoria is a general purpose language whereas Lua is designed to supplement flexible applications with scripting capabilities--like in-game scripting.

As for performance... the speed different is huge in some cases. For example an old version of interpreted Euphoria performed a sieve benchmark ~18.5 times faster than Lua. Todays Euphoria has even faster execution speed than before, plus execution speed can be further enhanced up to 5x simply by using the automatic Euphoria to C translator--now also FOSS.

"Euphoria is a general purpose language whereas Lua is designed to supplement flexible applications with scripting capabilities--like in-game scripting."

This is a marketing difference, not a technical one. You can perfectly use lua as a general purpose language, but the fact that it's also well suited for inclusion into other applications is a significant advantage.

Anyway, lack of associative containers in a language meant for high level programming = FAIL (not to mention the lack of functional programming which is also a tremendously useful tool to write concise and nice code, especially for GUIs)

If you want speed, use a compiled language, or a jitted one if you want some compromise between language flexibility and speed (incidentally, there is a lua JIT interpreter)

Or a mix between a compiled language and an interpeted one - which is something at which lua is very good.

Your comments about speed are anecdotic at best.

Ps. If the euphoria guys read that, please, pretty please: make a monochrom version of your site. I think I burnt half of my retinal cones while browsing it.